Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Exploitation

I'm not even to page thirty of the two hundred sixty-three page report from the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is closer to a Tom Clancy novel than reality ought to be. But let me just say that it appears that while a significant number of career bureaucrats raised various objections, the widespread use of torture required the collusion of an awful lot of very sick people.

It's also worth pointing out that the SACS memo probably means that we don't know the full story behind the "good faith legal advice" given to the CIA. We know that CIA's General Counsel received a memo from the OLC authorizing waterboarding. But we have no visibility into CIA's internal deliberations on the legality of waterboarding.

Oh, and almost goes without saying: Disbar John Yoo. Disbar Jay Bybee. Impeach Jay Bybee. Do it now. I've been something of a wet in terms of punishment, but we can't just let these people waltz back into polite society after these perversion of the law and basic morality.

who we are

Nicholas Beaudrot is an accidental political observer living in Seattle, Washington. By day he writes software for Amazon.com, snowboards, and plays ultimate frisbee. By night [and morn] he posts to this blog, runs the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and tries to cook decent Italian cuisine. A graduate of Brown University with a joint degree in Mathematics-Computer Science, in late 2003 Nicholas felt the urge to put his knack with numbers towards a greater social purpose than winning his fantasy baseball league or taking up poker, perhaps in an act of penance for not voting in 2000. He has been spotted standing in line for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, on the Atlanta area quiz bowl program "Hi-Q", and as a young boy in national broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Saint Philip. If you play Halo 3, Team Fortress II, Rock Band 2, Catan, or a number of other games, he's on Xbox live as niq24601.

Neil Sinhababu is a philosophy professor at the National University of Singapore. It's a tropical island with good public transit and they're very nice about not caning him. He's fond of red-state college towns like Austin, where he got his PhD. Much of his research is in ethics — hence his alias "Neil the Ethical Werewolf," which contains the name of his philosophy blog. He has also published on Nietzsche and on how to have a girlfriend in another universe. His utilitarianism shapes his goals and tactical views, and makes it impossible for him to stay away from politics. At Harvard, he won a student government election by eating fire in each dorm room in his district. He'd be happy to use this skill to help Democrats in tough races. He likes drinking with smart people and dancing in altogether ridiculous ways. At his last project, War or Car, he showed that you could buy each US household a Prius or each panda a stealth bomber for the price of the Iraq War.